The officer aimed at the guerrilla's body and fired. Dust puffed from the shoulder of the black jacket.
The officer fired twice more, then blasted out the remainder of his ten-round magazine. The hard ground sprayed grit in all directions; one bullet ricocheted and spanged into a doorjamb, missing a child by centimeters at most.
The group of dependents edged away. Bullets had disfigured still further the face of the corpse.
"Well, get on with it!" the lieutenant screamed to his men. His voice sounded tinny from the muzzle blasts of his weapon.
The soldiers grimaced and grasped the body awkwardly in their gloved hands. A glove slipped as they swung the guerrilla onto the tailgate of the truck. The body hung, about to fall back.
The lieutenant grabbed a handful of the Consie's hair and held it until the enlisted men could get better grips and finish their task.
Suilin resumed walking toward the motor pool. He was living in a nightmare, and his ears buzzed like wasps . . . .
"Now, to split the screen,"said squat Joe Albers, Deathdealer's driver,"you gotta hold one control and switch the other one whatever way."
Hans Wager set his thumb on the left hold button and clicked the right-hand magnification control of the main screen to x4. The turret of the unnamed tank felt crowded with two men in it, although Wager himself was slim and Albers was stocky rather than big.
"Does it matter which control you hold?" asked Holman, peering down through the hatch.
"Naw, whichever you want," Albers said while Wager watched the magical transformations on his screen.
The left half of the main screen maintained its portion of a 360° panorama viewed by the light available in the human visual spectrum. Broad daylight, at the moment. The right portion of the screen had shrunk into a 90°° arc whose field of view was only half its original height.
Wager twisted the control dial,rotating the magnified sector slowly around the tank's surroundings. Smoke still smoldered upward from a few places beyond the berm; here and there, sunlight glittered where the soil seared by powerguns had enough silicon to glaze.
The berth on the right side of the tank was empty. The combat car assigned there had bought it in the clearing operation. Buzzbombs. The close-in defense system hadn't worked or hadn't worked well enough, same difference. Albers said a couple of the crew were okay . . . .
Wager's field of view rolled across the Yokel area. The barracks nearest the Slammers were in good shape still; but by focusing down one of the streets and rolling the magnification through x16 to x64, he could see that at least a dozen buildings in a row had burned.
A few bolts from a powergun and those frame structures went up like torches . . . .
The best protection you had in a combat car wasn't armor or even your speed: it was the volume of fire you put on the other bastard and anywhere the other bastard might be hiding.
Tough luck for the Yokels who'd been burned out.Tougher luck,much tougher, for the Consies who'd tried to engage Hammer's Slammers.
"For the driver," Albers said with a nod up toward Holman's intent face, "it's pretty much the same as a combat car."
"The weight's not the bloody same," Holman said.
"Sure,you gotta watch yer inertia,"the veteran driver agreed, "but you do the same things. You get used to it."
He looked back over at Wager. The right half-screen was now projecting a magnified slice of what appeared at one-to-one on the left.
On the opposite side of the encampment, a couple of the permanent maintenance staff worked beside another tank. The junior tech looked on while his boss, a swag-bellied warrant three, settled a length of pipe in the jig of a laser saw.
"Turret side, though," Albers went on, "you gotta be careful. About half what you know from cars, that's the wrong thing in the turret of a panzer."
"I don't like not having two more pair of eyes watchin' my back," Wager muttered as his visuals swam around the circumference of the motionless tank.
"The screens'll watch for you," Albers said gently.
He touched a key without pressing it. "You lock one of 'em onto alert at all times. The AI in here, it's like a thousand helmet systems all at once. It's faster, it catches more, it's better at throwing out the garbage that just looks like it's a bandit."
The hatches of the Tactical Operations Center, a command car without drive fans, were open, but from this angle Wager couldn't see inside. The backs of two Slammers, peering within from the rear ramp, proved there was a full house—a troop meeting going on. What you'd expect after a contact like last night's.
"Not like having tribarrels pointing three ways, though," Holman said. Dead right, even though she'd never crewed a combat vehicle before.
Albers looked up at her."If you want,"he said,"you can slave either of the guns to the threat monitor. It'll swing 'em as soon as it pops the alert."
Deathdealer,Albers' own tank,was parked next to the TOC.A tarpaulin slanted from the top of the skirts to the ground,sheltering the man beneath."Via,"Wager muttered. "He's racked out now?"
Birdie Sparrow's right hand was visible beneath the edge of the tarp. It was twitching.Albers looked at the magnified screen,then laid his fingers over Eager on the dial and rolled the image away.
"Birdie's all right," the veteran driver said."He takes a little getting used to, is all. And the past couple months, you know, he's been a little, you know . . . loose."
"That's why they sent you back here with the blower instead of using some newbies for transit?" Holman asked.
Bent over this way, Holman had to keep brushing back the sandy brown curls that fell across her eyes. Her hair was longer than Wager had thought, and the strands appeared remarkably fine.
"Yeah, something like that, I guess," Albers admitted. "Look, Birdie's great when it drops in the pot like last night. Only . . . since his buddy DJ got zapped, he don't sleep good, is all."
"Newbies like us,"Wager said bitterly. Not new to war, not him at least; but new to this kind of war.
"I can see this gear can do everything but tuck me goodnight. But I'm bloody sure that I won't remember what to do the first time I need to. And that's liable to be my ass." He glanced upward. "Our ass."
Holman flashed him a tight smile.
"Yeah,well,"Albers agreed."Simulators help, but on-the-job training's the only game there's ever gonna be for some things."
Albers rubbed his scalp,grimacing in no particular direction. "You know,"he went on, "you can take care a' most stuff if you know what button to push. But some things, curst if I know where the button is."
It seemed to Hans Wager that Albers' eyes were searching for the spot on the main screen where his tank commander lay shivering beneath a sunlit tarp.
When Dick Suilin was twenty meters from the motor pool, a jeep exploded within the wire-fenced enclosure. The back of the vehicle lurched upward. The contents of its fuel tank sprayed in all directions, then whoomped into a fireball that rose on the heat of its own combustion.